


Together, Always

by AshStoryLover123



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020), The Old Guard (Movie 2020) RPF
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Hurt Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Hurt/Comfort, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolò di Genova are in Love, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani is an Incurable Romantic, M/M, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Friendship, Protective Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Protective Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:42:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27725648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshStoryLover123/pseuds/AshStoryLover123
Summary: For the first time in centuries, Joe’s face brings him an unending wave of rage that has tears rolling down his cheeks as a scream rips out from his throat.“We go together. We’re supposed to go together,” he screams, clutching Joe’s shirt in agony hard enough that the blood soaked material rips between his fingers.Joe gets hurt on a mission and doesn’t wake up for a longer time than usual. Nicky thinks he’s lost him, let the angst ensue.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 26
Kudos: 427





	Together, Always

Nicky 

The building is eerily similar to Merrick’s. 

A tall glass skyscraper that’s foreboding to say the least at night. Nicky almost thinks they won’t face any trouble as he fights to keep his tread silent against the tiled floor. Joe is at his back, Nile in front of him. Andy stubbornly leads them and after their first few missions, Nicky is done trying to convince the woman to let one of them go in first. 

The four of them enter a large living room of sorts with a bar counter and a couple of stools. There’s a red light that’s blinking eerily in the corner, security cameras. Their faces are all hidden with masks but it will still take some work for Copley to erase. 

Nicky follows Andy to the far side of the room as she crouches before one of the safes. She fiddles with the lock for hardly two seconds before unsheathing one of her sharpest knives to carve the door open. The door emits a shrieking noise and Joe hisses at the other side of the room like an angry cat.

“I hate that sound,” he mutters.

Andy carves another line, louder this time and Joe grumbles under his breath. Nicky can’t help his smile, briefly glancing Joe’s way. He’s standing beside Nile with an eye on the door, gun leveled at it. 

Feeling Nicky’s stare, he turns briefly to grin and that’s when the door’s blown off of its hinges. The fire alarm goes off, the room’s bathed in red and Nicky’s first instinct is to cover Andy’s body with his own in case of explosives. 

But there are only people with guns. Andy shoves him off and pulls out a gun, firing two shots at the man nearest to them. The two of them form a unforgiving duo of their own right after centuries of fighting at each other’s sides. Joe and Nile lay waste to the other side of the room. 

It’s all going as well as an ambush can when a misfired bullet hits one of the glass windows, showering Andy with its shards. The woman barely flinches but that’s not where the problem comes from.

Nicky watches as Nile falters a little, her eyes drifting to the opening in the building that’s letting cool air blow in. Joe is enough to hold people back as Nile regains her footing but a well-place bullet to her hip pushes her closer to the open window. 

“Joe,” Andy shouts from across the room. 

Joe glances their way before following their gaze to Nile. Nile’s eyes are wide and glassy and Nicky knows she’s remembering her fall from Merrick’s tower. Nicky hadn’t known that day that Nile was afraid of heights but they all knew now. 

In Joe’s temporary distraction, he takes a bullet to his shoulder that has him falling back closer to Nile. Joe takes down two more men before he runs out of bullets. He curses, unsheathing his scimitar but a blonde man is already lining up his next shot. 

Nile takes the bullet for Joe but it sends her reeling towards the edge and Nicky sees the primal fear in her eyes, hears it in her surprised shout. But then Joe is there, pushing her away from the edge just as a bullet catches his shoulder. 

“Joe,” Nicky yells, more unintentionally than anything as Joe takes a step back into air. His arms flail before him uselessly and Nicky tries cutting a path to him as fast as he can. Nile twists around and lunges for Joe’s outstretched hand. 

But she misses him by bare millimeters as Joe topples off the edge, taking Nicky’s heart with him.

The desire to get to Joe has all three of them wiping out everyone left in under five minutes. Nicky’s trying to keep himself still as the elevator takes him down but he cannot stop worrying. He won’t until he sees Joe breath again.

Joe’s fall is all too similar to Nile’s and it’s Andy that rips the wrecked car door open before allowing Nicky to lean in. Joe is still out cold and Nicky pulls him out carefully until Joe’s sitting with his head against the car door, eyes still closed. 

Nicky tries desperately to force his worry down but his brain’s descended into a foggy mess of paranoia that he can only return from with the sound of Joe’s voice, calling him home.

He lifts a hand to Joe’s cheek, the cut that’s still not healing. He brushes his hand over the other cuts and bruises on his face, the bullet wound in his shoulder, the odd angle of Joe’s elbow. 

None of them have healed yet.

Nicky’s finds the air suddenly deprived of oxygen as he scans Joe’s body more urgently. The leg that’s still broken in two places, the cheekbone on the right side of his face that’s caved in. 

They haven’t healed. 

“Come on Joe,” Nicky murmurs, planting both hands more firmly on either side of Joe’s head to bring him closer. There’s no warm breath against his lips, no movement of bones and tissue beneath his hands. Nicky runs a hand through Joe’s hair and draws it away sticky with Joe’s blood.

He’s going to be sick, going to puke right on this sidewalk if his chest doesn’t stop burning.

“Anytime now Joe,” Nicky urges. He lifts the hem of Joe’s shirt and there’s a bullet wound there too, unhealed alongside shards of glass. Nicky takes them out one by one with shaky hands if only so he’d have something to do while he waited instead of looking at Joe’s lifeless face and feeling like he’s swallowed crushed glass. 

Andy crouches beside him with a frown, patting Joe’s body down efficiently for anything that might be stopping his healing. She finds nothing and Nicky sees the faint surprise in her eyes that she immediately tries to conceal.

“Let’s get moving. He’ll wake up soon enough,” Andy says.

Nicky tries to draw some comfort in that conviction as he lifts Joe off the ground with Nile’s help. Nile’s worry is more palpable and Nicky can barely look at her for fear he’ll start crying or screaming right then and there.

The drive back to the safehouse is pin drop silent. Joe’s head is in his lap, eyes still closed. Nicky’s shaking hand lies over his heart, entwined with Joe’s, waiting for his heartbeat to return.

The minutes tick by and it doesn’t. It’s just this dead hollow silence that’s beginning to eat away at his soul.

“Amore please,” Nicky cracks, leaning forward until his forehead rests on Joe’s chest. He tries to keep his shoulders still as he allows himself to cry a little.

He’s not mourning, refuses to but he’s scared, terrified beyond measure and reason. He wants to be held but the arms he needs are cold and lifeless now. 

“Nicky we’re here,” Andy says, gently even. 

Nicky lifts his head and catches Andy’s gaze in the rearview mirror. 

And the stab of a serrated knife to his chest would have hurt less than the tears he sees on Andy’s cheeks. He looks to Nile, who’s crying silently as well as she reaches back to clutch one of Joe’s cold hands between two of hers. 

Nicky snatches it back, suddenly furious beyond belief. 

“He’s not gone,” he spits.

Nile jerks back in surprise, having never seen him angry before. Andy’s just got the most sorrowful expression he’s ever seen and if it were anyone but Andy, he’d have punched them. 

“He’s not gone,” Nicky growls, enunciating every word clearly. 

He looks back down at Joe and that peaceful yet lifeless face feels like it’s mocking him. A hand settles on his shoulder and he shakes it off viciously.

“Joe. Joe this isn’t, please come back to me now,” Nicky says, running his hands over Joe’s various wounds in turn to see if any of them have healed. 

But all that’s happened in the last twenty minutes is his pants turning progressively more red with blood as Joe gets colder and stiffer in his arms.

“Joe please,” Nicky gasps out, holding Joe’s wrist hard enough to bruise, feeling for his pulse. 

“It’s been 30 minutes Nicky,” Andy says softly. 

“He wouldn’t leave me,” Nicky cries out. 

He feels like a child even as he says it. He releases his death grip on Joe’s wrist and watches as the red bruise left by his grip doesn’t fade immediately. 

And it’s that that ultimately kills him and for the first time in centuries, Joe’s face brings him an unending wave of rage that has tears rolling down his cheeks as a scream rips out from his throat.

“We go together. We’re supposed to go together,” he screams, clutching Joe’s shirt in agony hard enough that the blood soaked material rips between his fingers. The door behind him opens and he’s being pulled back and out of the car. 

Nicky screams, lurches forward on instinct to grasp Joe again but Andy’s always been stronger than him. She bands her arms around him as he screams in anguish. In his head, he’s cursing death, he’s cursing fate, he’s cursing every man in that damned skyscraper and above all he’s cursing himself for not getting to Joe fast enough.

Out loud, he’s screaming Joe’s name like it’s the only word he knows, the only word that matters. 

He’d seen Nile falter, seen Joe step closer to that ledge. 

“Nicky you have to breath,” Andy demands. 

“How,” he asks. It comes out a howl. 

He cannot go on, he was not meant to go on like this. Before even Andy can react, he unsheathes the dagger at her waist and draws a line across the top of his arm. 

The blood wells up and then the wound closes again between one blink and the next. It’s mocking him. The world is mocking him. 

“I need to follow him. Andy I need,” Nicky says, over and over again.

“I’m sorry Nicky. I’m so sorry,” Andy says, crying fully now as she pulls his head to burrow into her shoulder, rocking him back and forth. It’s not the comfort he wants, not the arms he needs right now. It’s but a pale imitation of his Yusuf’s warmth and it makes him angry too. 

Anger is all he has now, the anger and rage and agony that drove Booker to the bottle, that’s had Andy lose faith in the world time and time again. He doesn’t know who he’ll be if this continues to rip him to shreds like this, doesn’t know if there will be anything left. He’s given everything he has to Yusuf. He doesn’t even have memories of a life that doesn’t contain Yusuf. 

“I can’t. I cannot go on,” Nicky says quietly. He doesn’t know if he’s appealing to Andy or some higher power to destroy him. He pulls out of Andy’s embrace and returns to Joe’s side, He shifts Joe slightly to curl up next to him, like death will take them both if they are close enough to one another. Nile’s watching him, torn somewhere between horror and sympathy and guilt, as Nicky wraps Joe’s arms around him and buries his face against Joe’s chest. 

There is no heartbeat there, no warmth in these arms either but Nicky will stay here, tethered to Yusuf’s side even after death. There is no other place he belongs in this world anyway. 

He hears Nile shifting beside him but then Andy’s there, pulling Nile out of the car to leave him be. All her years and she doesn’t know how to handle this. He knows that she has lost before but no one’s ever loved anyone as much as he and Joe love each other. 

This isn’t loss. This, this is the closest Nicky has been to death amongst the countless deaths he has faced over the centuries. 

He burrows closer, trying to find warmth when there’s none to find. He cannot extinguish his hope that Joe will come back to him, that he’ll outwit death itself and return to his side. Joe would have razed the world to ash if it meant returning to Nicky, would have spent a thousand years plunging into oceans if a coffin had taken him under. Death is but an obstacle to their love, isn’t it? 

“Come back to me my heart. I’ll wait here forever if I have to, but Nile and Andy are beginning to worry,” Nicky whispers against Joe’s chest.

There’s no reply, no movement. Nicky eventually drifts off after his pleas begin to sound hoarse to his own ears. In sleep he can imagine, for just a second that Yusuf is alive again, and warm, and his breath will tickle the back of Nicky’s neck when he wakes up and that beard will scratch against his cheek as Yusuf leans over to kiss him, eyes crinkling with joy that only their love brings.

It’s why he doesn’t really register anything amiss as he wakes to arms tightening minutely around his body. He doesn’t question it when the cheek pressed against the top of his forehead shifts slightly before warm lips press to the side of Nicky’s head. 

Nicky only curls in closer when Joe’s heartbeat starts again.

“Nicky. Niccolo, let’s wash this blood off and sleep inside the house habibi,” Joe says gently. 

And that’s when it hits Nicky with all the force of a lightning strike. He tears away from Joe on instinct and falls off the edge of the seat in the process. Joe’s immediately looking over the edge with worry, reaching out to hold him again.

“Nicky what? Have you been crying? What’s wrong, are the others okay,” Joe presses. 

He’s about to look towards to the house when Nicky darts forward again to capture Joe’s lips with his own. Joe gives a surprised yelp, but doesn’t protest at the awkward angle and the kiss that’s far too sloppy for how long they’ve been doing this. When Nicky draws back, Joe’s eyes are still shining with concern.

“Is it Andy? Nile,” Joe whispers, hands cupping Nicky’s face, wiping away his tears. He glances towards the house again like he can see past it’s walls. 

“It’s been nearly half a day Joe,” Nicky gets out, voice still raw from the crying and the pleading. 

Joe freezes for a second in shock before his mind puts it all together, Nicky’s tears, the desperate kiss. Then he’s sinking to the ground beside Nicky and pulling him into his lap, resting a hand on the back of Nicky’s head as he rocks him back and forth. 

And this, this is what Nicky needed. The tears start again and Nicky doesn’t think he’s wept this much in at least a century.

“You left me. You didn’t wake up,” Nicky rasped, trying and failing to not sound like a child. He’s a child without Joe, a lost infant looking for a hand to hold and a heart to care for it. 

“I would never leave you. I swear that to you Niccolo,” Joe whispers in his ear. 

“That’s what I said but,” Nicky voice cracks. 

Joe makes a wounded noise before pulling back a little, only to plant kisses all over a Nicky’s face, his eyelids, his nose, the mole on his cheek, his lips, over and over until Nicky cannot think of anything past them. 

“I’m sorry habibi. I don’t know why,” Joe trailed off, uncertain, looking absolutely wretched. Joe reaches for a knife on the car seat and before Nicky can protest, he draws a line across his palm. 

It heals in seconds, just as Nicky’s did and now finally, Nicky can breath freely again.

“Why did it take so long before,” Joe asks aloud, sounding frighteningly vulnerable. Nicky puts his arms around Joe again, burrowing his face into the crook of his neck.

“It doesn’t matter. You came back to me,” Nicky says. 

“I did. I always will Niccolo,” Joe promises. 

“And I will always wait,” Nicky replies. Joe withdraws from him only to pull them both out of the car. Nicky keeps Joe wrapped around him as they walk back to the house. They’re just at the door when it swings open to reveal Andy and Nile. 

Andy goes pale, remains frozen in shock that Nicky has never seen on her face as Joe lifts her off the ground in a hug.

“I’m here Andromache. Just took a little longer,” Joe says. 

“A little,” she splutters. Joe draws back, stepping right into Nicky’s arms again, as Nicky hooks his chin over Joe’s shoulder. 

Andy furiously wipes away the tears that remained from earlier before crooking a finger at both of them.

“This, this is how it’s supposed to be. I don’t ever want to see one of you without the other,” she says angrily. 

“We’ll be glued at the hip Boss,” Joe teases. 

Nicky turns to Nile, whose guilt is less palpable now but nevertheless easy to spot.

“It would not have been your fault in any way Nile,” Nicky assured. The sentence is hard to get past the constriction in his throat and his arms tighten around Joe on instinct. Joe tilts his head back to plant a chaste kiss on Nicky’s cheek and Nicky let’s himself melt into it, melt into Joe who’s here, alive and safe in Nicky’s arms. 

Not even death would dare pry Joe from his arms.

“He pushed me out of the way. He shouldn’t have done that,” Nile says a little angrily.

“We are a family Nile. We protect each other,” Nicky assures. 

Nile’s eyes are filled with unshed tears, and it seems to be anger that keeps them at bay. It’s frighteningly similar to Andy’s way of handling her emotions.

“I’m sorry I froze. I didn’t mean to,” she says in a small voice. 

“Nile,” Joe condemns with a hiss of her name. He extends a hand to her and she puts her arms around him. Nicky wraps an arm around them both and glances away from them to find Andy standing at the doorway with a pleased, watery smile. 

He’s still staring as she winces slightly, pressing her hand tightly to her side. 

“You’ve been injured and you didn’t say,” Nicky asks. 

“What? Where,” Nile chimes in. 

“It’s just a graze,” Andy argues, raising her shirt to reveal the wound near her ribs.

“You’ve been shot Andy, what the hell,” Nile yells. 

Nicky can already tell that it isn’t a particularly serious wound, a graze as Andy put it. Still, it’s endearing to watch Nile fuss over the woman and Andy put up with it with a fake frown that Nile pays no heed to. Nicky pulls Joe into their bedroom and Joe comes easily, letting Nicky wrap his arms around him again. 

“I’m sorry Nicky,” Joe says softly. 

“Don’t, please don’t do that again,” Nicky urges. It’s directed more at whatever magic allows them immortality than Joe himself. 

“I wouldn’t dream of it. I will always come back to you hayati. There is nothing I wouldn’t do, no mountains I won’t cross if it brings me back to you. I have died more than a thousand deaths to live a thousand years at your side and I will remain at your side until we, together, have no more deaths to offer. When death reaches our doorstep it will come for both of us habibi. This fate that has tied our souls together will accept nothing different. I, I will accept nothing different,” Joe says passionately. 

And Nicky believes him, even smiles a little through the tears still dripping down his cheeks as Joe kisses him again to seal his promise.


End file.
